Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to techniques for detecting an anomaly in a road condition.
Related Art
A technique is known that detects an anomaly in a road condition, such as occurrence of accidents or presence of objects that have fallen onto the road, based on a driving state of a vehicle (for example, see Japanese Patent No. 2972479).
In the technique of Japanese Patent No. 2972479, image data captured by a plurality of cameras disposed along a road are image-processed by an anomaly detection apparatus disposed external to the vehicle to detect the driving state of the vehicle. The anomaly detection apparatus detects an anomaly in the road condition based on the detected driving state of the vehicle.
In the technique of Japanese Patent No. 2972479, however, the anomaly detection apparatus disposed external to the vehicle detects a driving state of the vehicle, and based on the detected driving state, detects an anomaly in the road condition. Thus, this technique suffers from the drawback that the processing load for detecting an anomaly in the road condition is concentrated in one place, i.e., the anomaly detection apparatus disposed external to the vehicle.
In addition, conventionally, a monitoring system is known that monitors a road condition using video acquired from a vehicle-mounted camera, and if an anomaly is detected, delivers anomaly information to vehicles via the monitoring apparatus of a monitoring center. For example, in a technique disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 5551236, a vehicle-mounted apparatus detects a road condition from an image captured by the vehicle-mounted camera via image recognition, compares the detection result with prepared contents of road condition database, and if a change in the road condition is detected, transmits the video to the monitoring apparatus of the monitoring center. In the monitoring center, an operator visually checks the video received from the monitoring apparatus, and then the monitoring apparatus delivers the check result to vehicles.
The disclosed apparatus of Japanese Patent No. 5551236 that detects a road condition via image recognition needs to have recognition results corresponding to all road conditions stored in the database. However, the road conditions may vary not only with occurrence of accidents or presence of objects that have fallen onto the road, but also with changes in events, such as weather, time of day, traffic, or peripheral buildings. In addition, since there are various variations in these events, the disclosed apparatus suffers from the drawback that it is impossible to accurately detect only an anomaly.
As described above, it is impossible to determine whether or not an abnormal situation is actually occurring, only via image recognition with sufficiently high accuracy. It is thus necessary to visually check the video in the monitoring center. That is, to detect occurrence of an abnormal situation without overlooking it, it is required that, even in the presence of a relatively small change in the road condition, the vehicle-mounted apparatus determine that an anomaly is occurring, and the monitoring center apparatus visually check whether or not the anomaly is actually occurring. However, such a configuration suffers from an increase in the communications traffic from the vehicle to the monitoring center apparatus and a large amount of workload for visual checks in the monitoring center apparatus.
In consideration of the foregoing, exemplary embodiments of the present invention are directed to providing techniques for distributing the processing load to detect an anomaly in a road condition.